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Home Again, and Pandas!
We're home! We flew back in from Shanghai last night, and we all stayed up until midnight, unpacking and getting sorted, in the hopes of getting back to Toronto time sooner rather than later. (Ros and I still woke up at 5, but at least it wasn't 3 like our first night in Beijing.)
Between the fancy schmancy new camera, our point-and-shoot and my iPhone, I've got nearly 2,000 pictures to sort through, but I thought I'd put up a couple of pics from Ros' panda adventure for now.
The panda was about 7 months old, nearly as big as Ros, and weighed more. His name was Oreo. In the first pic, he's just about to lick her, which she thought was hilarious.
Here she is with the panda more sitting beside her (he kept nearly squirming off her lap), looking very pleased.
In case you're wondering how they manage to keep the pandas relatively happy while sitting on people's laps, the handler constantly was smearing honey on his paw so he was concentrating more on licking the sweet stuff than all the crazy people waiting to hold him.
Between the fancy schmancy new camera, our point-and-shoot and my iPhone, I've got nearly 2,000 pictures to sort through, but I thought I'd put up a couple of pics from Ros' panda adventure for now.
The panda was about 7 months old, nearly as big as Ros, and weighed more. His name was Oreo. In the first pic, he's just about to lick her, which she thought was hilarious.
Here she is with the panda more sitting beside her (he kept nearly squirming off her lap), looking very pleased.
In case you're wondering how they manage to keep the pandas relatively happy while sitting on people's laps, the handler constantly was smearing honey on his paw so he was concentrating more on licking the sweet stuff than all the crazy people waiting to hold him.
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Ros + panda = adorable
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The panda seemed quite pleased by his honey bribe, so I'm sure he was fine with it. And lord knows we used candy enough times during the trip to get Ros to eat Chinese food. (She's picky and hates anything new. This is not a good combination for China.)
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In the meantime, have you read Jo Walton's Among Others? I'd stuck it on my Kobo for the trip and read the first half between Nanchang and Shanghai and it is absolutely brilliant. It was definitely a worthy Hugo winner.
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Among Others - my experience was quite different from yours, resulting in a bad poetry (http://just-ann-now.livejournal.com/396995.html) and some consoling discussion. Hee.
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As for Among Others, I can sort of see your point, but so far I'm enraptured. Though yeah, if the whole mystery of what happened isn't wrapped up satisfactorily, metaphorical throwing of pixels out the window may happen. And I can see the point that name checking a bunch of books you love isn't necessarily fascinating plotting, but the main character's experience of being a social outsider and raiding all available libraries for every science fiction and fantasy book she can find is pretty much how I spent my junior high and high school years, so I'm definitely bringing some autobiographical affection to the book. (I had the same experience with Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table recently. It's about a young boy on a sea voyage from Sri Lanka to England, tearing around the ship and trying to figure out the adults on board. The Sri Lanka to England part is foreign to me, but I did spend rather a lot of time poking around the Coast Guard ice breaker my dad was chief engineer on, and getting under the crew's feet. My boss, however, who lent me the book, found it interminable.)
If we all liked the same things, the world would be such a tedious place. *g*
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Lovely pictures of Ros and the panda. Glad you had a great trip and are now home safely.
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And I've caught up on two of the four POIs that were sitting on our PVR. Holy heck, how much do I love that show! (Just watched the one with Sarah Shahi. Much as I love Reese and Finch, I would totally watch a spin off with her character.)
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I hope you make a swift recovery.
I loved the Shaw episode, some of the fangirls not so much. *g*
I LOVED the would-have-been torture scene with Shaw and Root. Talk about passing the Bechdel test.
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The Shaw ep was brilliant. Those fangirls are wrong! Wrong, I tell you!
And the scene with Shaw and Root is what totally put it over the top for me. Putting those two strong, flawed, fascinating female characters up against each other was a brilliant move. And yep, totally passed the Bechdel test. It's about nothing but the two of them.
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Glad to hear you're back home safely! Can't wait to see more pics!
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It's good to be back home, though we're all still jet-lagged (it's 5 in the morning and we're all awake!) and I've got the cold everyone else had during the trip. But there will definitely be more pics posted!
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Ros + panda is definitely a fun combination. It took me a while to figure out the honey thing. The handler kept rubbing the panda's paw with a stick of bamboo, and I finally realized that she was dipping it in a jar of honey.
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Bears, fictional or not, are rather fun.
Oh, and I've got one pic I took just for you. As soon as I pull it off the point-and-shoot I'll send it along. ::iz mysterious::
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Boo for colds. I hope you're keeping warm and taking good meds ♥
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Welcome home... and my laptop just exploded from the sheer cuteness of baby panda + Ros. Awwwwwwwww!
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Looking forward to hear more about your trip later on.
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Can't wait to see and hear more.